Out of Due Time: Wilfrid Ward and the Dublin Review. By Dom Paschal Scotti. Pp. xi + 329. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. $69.95
Review by James P. Flint
Benedictine University
Journal of Ecclesiastical History April 2007
Wilfrid Ward would have good reason to be pleased with this magnificently-written and informative examination of his tenure (1906-16) as editor of the Dublin Review, the leading Catholic journal in the British Isles.
Though much can be learned about Wilfrid Ward in these pages, the primary object of study is the Dublin Review as Ward carried out the programme the Dom Paschal succinctly sums up in the preface: '[Ward] wished to bring the best of Catholic mind to the nation at large, revealing the intrinsic power and beauty of the faith which alone, he believed, could counter the dissolving forces of modernity, and to expose the Catholic faithful to the best of the changing world around them' (p. ix). This double programme faced challenges, especially in the midst of the so-called Modernist crisis, but Ward persevered and made the Dublin Review known and respected, inside and outside the Catholic Church. Dom Paschal allows the reader to appreciate the achievement. After two superb chapters on the earlier life of Ward and the previous history of the journal, he carefully studies its contents in seven chapters, extensive excerpts being provided from many of the articles.
For the taste of this reviewer, some of these could have been abbreviated. But they do demonstrate the range of the Dublin Review's interests and the seriousness with which its contributors addressed the problems of the day. In particular, the third chapter, 'Transcendence, revelation, and immanence,' will repay careful study with a clearer understanding of Ward's approach to the issues surrounding Modernism.
The editing of the book is flawless, and the work offers both an extensive bibliography of the period and a fascinating complete listing of the Dublin Review's contents while Ward was editor. The book is highly to be recommended, not only to students of British Catholicism, but to any who wish to deepen their knowledge of the intellectual life of the British Isles during the period under consideration.
Review by Dermot Quinn
Seton Hall University
American Historical Review
Wilfrid Ward was a member of one of the most intellectually distinguished English Catholic families of the last two centuries. His father William George Ward was an Oxford convert and disciple of John Henry Newman whose delight in controversy might have made him, in another age, a good candidate for talk radio. ("There are two views of which I, as usual, take the more bigoted.") His wife, Josephine, was a popular novelist who was connected by family ties to the Duke of Norfolk. His siblings became variously nuns and priests (one of them, Bernard, a fine historian). His daughter, Maisie, wrote what is still the best biography of G. K. Chesterton. With such pedigree, and with considerable gifts in his own right, Ward could hardly have failed to shape Catholic opinion in the dying days of Victorian England and in the years immediately before the World War I. That he did so, but as some cost to his health, reputation, and happiness, is the subject of this solid and useful intellectual biography by Paschal Scotti. Wilfrid Ward was "out of due time"- a man too original and philosophically impatient for some of his more staid contemporaries- but this impact was lasting. His ambition and achievement, Scotti maintains, was to "educate Catholics to their responsibilities...to broaden their horizons, [to discourage] intellectual flabbiness," and, all the while, to maintain the institutional loyalty and deferential conservatism" that made all of it possible. Lesser men would have buckled under the pressure. Ward himself eventually grew weary.
The Dublin Review was the vehicle for this influence. Founded in 1836 by Daniel O'Connell and Nicholas (later Cardinal) Wiseman, it was the most important journal of serious Catholic opinion in the English-speaking world, enormously significant in its day. Ward edited it from 1906 to 1916, publishing writers such as Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Alice Meynell, Herbert Thurston, C.C. Martindale, Robert Hugh Benson, and others less distinguished, asking only that their articles be "well written, loyal to the Church, understanding of the world, and sympathetic to whatever was valuable outside the household of faith" (p. 53). This tall order was achieved more often than not. The Review was both serious and accessible to the general reader. It was also unsectarian. Wanting to attract non-Catholic readers and writers, Ward succeeded in opening its pages to contemporary opinion across a wide spectrum: art, politics, literature, foreign affairs. By introducing Catholics to the world and the world to Catholics, his legacy was to build bridges that, half a century later, came to their point of conjunction in the Second Vatican Council. He was indeed "out of due time." Most of his life was lived in the shadow of the First Vatican Council, which seemed to cry defiance to the world (the world defiant in return). It was an irony less sensitive souls might have savored. For Ward, it probably hastened his death.
The almost impossible balancing act of his editorship was most clearly on display during the "Modernist" crisis. This "synthesis of all heresies" (as Pope Pius X later described it) was the work of thinkers such as George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy, who, challenging the church's traditional understanding of revelation and transcendence, contended that greater historical awareness- some sense of circumstance and human contingency- should play a part in the articulation of the Catholic dogma and belief. Newman had spoken a generation before of the "development of doctrine," an adumbration of modernism but by no means the same thing as it. He argued his case with subtlety- the same subtlety that enemies took for jesuitry or mental reservation- but Tyrrell and Loisy seemed to relish the fight for its own sake. This left Ward in a quandary. He made his pages available to leading modernists- he had some sympathy with their thinking and considerable respect for Newman- but as soon as modernism was condemned (in September 1907) he conformed to the teaching authority of the church, shutting out more advanced thinkers from the Review and publicly warning that "un-chastened and irresponsible speculation" (p. 76) posed a danger to the faith. It was a kind of death for him and yet also a liberation. What some saw as a contradictory timidity- the abandonment of a belief in free expression in order to rescue an editorship supposed devoted to it- Ward himself saw as a necessary act of obedience to a wisdom greater than his own. In the end, he wrote, it was the "duty of every catholic reviewer...to signify his acceptance of, and obedience to, [the] utterance of Supreme Authority." It was the duty of Catholics, in other words, to be Catholics and not Protestants. That was a defensible position- indeed an honorable one- but it cannot have strengthened his standing among the non-Catholics to whom Ward wished to appeal.
Scotti chronicles these controversies with patience and fair-mindedness, his book covering the full range of issues that preoccupied the English-speaking Catholic world in the prewar years. A monograph that includes Thomas Aquinas, the Belgian Congo, and the Gaelic League is catholic indeed. At times the treatment is a little dutiful- some articles best forgotten are restored, Lazarus-like, to miraculous second life- but this is a small price to pay for a valuable compendium of important writing and thinking. Ward, largely forgotten now, was a man of consequence. In Scotti he has found a worthy Boswell.
